American Murder: Three True Crime Classics

American Murder

Three True Crime Classics

Darcy O’Brien

CONTENTS

Murder in Little Egypt

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Acknowledgments

Sources

The Hillside Stranglers

Dedication

Preface

I Mi numi!

II Disloyalties

III A Resurrection of Faith

Epilogue

Sources and Acknowledgments

A Dark and Bloody Ground

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Sources and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Murder in Little Egypt

To

Suzanne

who went down to Egypt

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Acknowledgments

Sources

Pap warn’t in a good mood that morning—so he was his natural self.

—Huck Finn

1

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS, CALLED EGYPT BY ITS NATIVES, IS THAT inverted triangle bounded by the Wabash, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, bordered by Kentucky on the south and by an indeterminate line drawn east from St. Louis on the north. In this land between the rivers, people lead lives that are self-contained, known only to themselves, cut off, if it were not for television, from the rest of the country. Down there they know that Chicago is up north, but they seldom think about it, and they know that the people in Chicago rarely think about them. A joke has it that in southern Illinois, mothers frighten their children not with the bogeyman but with the threat of never going to St. Louis. This Egypt is a secret and a secretive sort of place, an outback and a throwback to earlier, murkier times.

The rare visitor to this other Illinois may seize on the word surreal to describe the landscape: peaceful-looking small farms, white churches, little brick-faced towns, lakes where Canada geese spend the autumn and winter, the big muddy rivers, the Ozark hills that, covered in hardwoods, rise in the Shawnee National Forest—a reassuring prospect, idyllic if you care for isolation, but disrupted every few miles by enormous coal pits, strip mines scarring the land with their huge power shovels several stories high, tearing up the ground, leaving behind black heaps where not even weeds can grow. Local children call the shovels monsters and ask to be taken on Sunday drives to see them. Their great booms reaching skyward, they look like giant mechanical insects rooting in the earth. At night the coal dust, lying in gob piles, sometimes spontaneously ignites, lighting the air with a weird orange flicker. Southern Illinois gets its share of sunshine, but night and gray, gloomy days seem to fit the place, its black mines, and its obscurity.

It has been called Egypt since the rugged winters of 1824 and 1831–1832, when northerners journeyed south to buy corn and seed, imagining themselves as the sons of Jacob, who went down to Egypt to buy corn in Genesis 42. After 1832 the term Egypt came into general use, as people enjoyed thinking that they had settled in a land of plenty sanctioned by Scripture, though the soil was actually thin compared to the rest of Illinois. In 1837 the town of Cairo (pronounced Kerro) was chartered at the Nile-like delta where the Ohio joins the Mississippi; Karnak and Thebes followed, and many Biblical names, Palestine, Lebanon, Mt. Carmel, Eden, Goshen, Olive Branch, Herod, even a Sodom that vanished early in this century.

In the heart of Egypt, often called Little Egypt, lie Eldorado and Harrisburg, coal towns that have not changed much from sixty or seventy years ago, except for the K marts and Wal-Marts and Huck’s Convenience Food Stores that line the highways on their outskirts. They stand seven miles apart on Route 45 about thirty miles west of the Ohio, separated by Muddy, which is mostly just the Gateway motel, restaurant and liquor store, formerly a Holiday Inn, still the major social center for both towns, the site of Peggy Ozment’s annual Christmas party, to which four hundred of the local business and social elite get invited. 5200 FRIENDLY PEOPLE says the sign on Route 45 outside Eldorado, AND ONE OL’ SOREHEAD, with a cartoon of a sour-faced man in overalls; Harrisburg has twice as many people, equally friendly, though not to strangers.

A stranger in Eldorado (pronounced Elder-RAY-dough) feels uneasy, as in any small town where everybody knows everybody and an out-of-state license plate provokes stares. Except for the hunters who come in for the geese or the deer in the Shawnee forest, this has never been a big tourist area in spite of the beauties of the Ohio, and the people are unused to dealing with outsiders. State your business, the silence asks as you pay for a Hershey bar at Terry’s Market. The sense of not belonging, and of not being wanted particularly, haunts the stranger as it does in parts of Arkansas and in the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee. Family ties and local associations matter here, one can sense, and nothing else.

You can tour Eldorado in half an hour. Once the town had the only railroad station in Saline County; now that there are none, it has the Depot Inn restaurant, which serves ham and eggs and chicken-fried steak in part of the abandoned station. Downtown the new First State Bank building, right angles of red brick and glass, stands out among the old, weathered red-brick structures, the boarded-up movie theater, the pool hall, Bertis Herrmann’s tin shop, and the Jet Set beauty parlor, located in a trailer that needs paint. The Ferrell Hospital on Pine Street, with its green awnings and clearly marked emergency entrance, appears prosperous, more so than the Pearce Hospital over on Organ Street, a rectangular, bunkerlike building of thin, pink-purplish brick that brings to mind a large veterinary clinic. The number of churches impresses, sixteen in all, twelve of them Baptist, fundamentalist, or charismatic of one kind or another.

Eldorado’s neighborhoods range from neat little white frame houses on hilly, tree-lined streets to shacks in irregular rows that straggle out along and beyond the railroad tracks. In the tidy areas pride and industry are everywhere apparent in the trimmed lawns and shrubs, the garden furniture ranged around the outdoor grill, the pots of flowers and plaster statuary—toads, deer, flamingoes, the rare nymph—and the polished automobiles, mostly Fords and Chevys, many pickups, a few vans. Emblems of the season, pumpkins or Christmas wreaths and lights, never fail to appear here. Elsewhere rusty trailers and pickups get parked in yards along with other junk. Tiny houses look patched together. Eldorado seems about half proud and half given up. In a ramshackle area a portable sign, the kind with stick-on plastic letters, stands beside a Laundromat and tells a story:

LAUNERY

WE DO MINING CLOTHES.

Harrisburg has more enterprise and more money. Several of the houses in the two-hundred block on Walnut Street approach elegance, many of them nicely landscaped, two and three stories high with porticoes reminiscent of the Old South. The Bar-B-Q Barn on Main Street, lately spruced up and decorated with old farm and kitchen implements, also feels southern, offering different kinds of pickled vegetables and fried okra along with the ribs. The accents of the diners sound southern, too, indistinguishable from those of neighboring western Kentucky except for an ar sound for or, as in barn again for born again, park roast for pork roast.

The families of most of the people of southern Illinois migrated from the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky before and immediately after the Civil War. A coal boom early in this century brought in Italians, Czechs, and Poles to work the mines, but the Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish southern strain still predominates. These are white southerners. You can spend all day in Eldorado or Harrisburg without seeing a black person. Eldorado has no black families, Harrisburg only a handful.

Poor, shiftless, and ignorant outcasts, a writer from northern Illinois called the immigrant southerners in 1871. Of the humbler class, a sympathetic, local historian described them in 1875, adding that there were no half-breeds, neither of Indians nor other obnoxious races. In private life they lived with austerity, and in society moved with chivalrous spirit. But by the turn of the century the phrases worthless as an Egyptian and scabby as an Egyptian were in common use, and it was said that to call a man a son of Egypt was considered an affront and meant a fight or a foot race. In the early days of the nineteenth century, southern Illinois had been the commercial center of the state, but it declined into poverty after the Civil War, inviting the northerners’ contempt. Today incomes remain low, unemployment is perennially between thirteen and twenty percent, dependence on public relief double that in central and northern Illinois. Over fifty percent of the people of Eldorado have for decades relied on public assistance of one kind or another, a rate matched or exceeded only in the Chicago ghettoes.

In the town square of Harrisburg, however, sometimes called Shawnee Square, people move about with a certain determination, something short of a bustle but businesslike. They have been here a long time and intend to stay, no matter what the rest of the state thinks. The word Chicago can provoke an epithet and the wish that that city be shoved into Lake Michigan with a bulldozer. In the center of the square stands the almost windowless, modem Saline County Courthouse, brick and concrete, not beautiful but new and substantial. On a comer of the square the Harrisburg National Bank, founded 1876, occupies the town’s tallest building, a seven-story red-brick tower with ornate cornices, built during the coal boom.

Over at the First Bank and Trust on Walnut, you can receive a two-gun set of Smith & Wesson automatic pistols on purchasing special certificates of deposit, a promotional gimmick so successful that the Associated Press carried a story about it in 1986, attracting money from as far away as San Francisco, as the bank’s officers will tell you proudly.

The free pistols epitomize certain aspects of the character of Egypt. To understand this, and the vague sense of apprehension a visitor feels, it helps to know that Saline County, like the entire eleven-county area known as Little Egypt, is one of the most violent places in America, with a murder rate per capita comparable to or exceeding in any given year that of Chicago or New York City. Compared to the United States as a whole, the annual murder rate in Little Egypt is nearly double, about 10.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, 6.6 for the rest of the country. Of rural and semi-rural areas, only Harlan County, Kentucky, rivals it for violence.

Many Egyptian murders have a special, local flavor to them, as with the wife who shot her husband to death, cut him up, and fed him to the hogs; or the thirty-year-old son who loved his mother so much that he laced his daddy’s iced tea with antifreeze. Bar fights ending in shoot-outs take their toll.

This violence has been an unbroken tradition for nearly two hundred years.

There’s not a lot of murderers and cutthroats in southern Illinois, Will Rogers told a reporter for the Marion Daily Republican in 1926. They are real people, congenial and hospitable. But instead of being like a lot of committees, fussing and arguing, calling each other names, they just shoot it out if it’s necessary.

Will Rogers was reacting to the gangsters who were shooting each other with impunity all over Little Egypt in the mid-twenties. But before them the Ku Klux Klansmen ruled, murdering at least fifty people in two years, all in the cause of Americanism, which in southern Illinois meant temperance: There were not enough blacks in the region for even a white supremacist to worry about, so the Klan united against Italian and Irish Catholics in defense of Prohibition, with the Klan’s contributions to local Protestant ministers assuring their support. And in 1922, twenty strikebreakers were shot to death, mutilated, and their corpses spat on by a union mob in what became known as the Herrin Massacre, a labor dispute at a strip mine, the culmination of a thirty years’ war between union and management. Nine men went on trial after the Herrin Massacre. All nine gained acquittal, and the state gave up on further prosecutions, accepting that local loyalties made convictions impossible.

From 1868 to 1876 the Bloody Vendetta, a feud involving four prominent families, took the lives of at least six men and terrorized the countryside. When local authorities seemed unable or unwilling to gain indictments, let alone convictions, the Chicago Tribune thundered from the north, The feud is a disgrace to the whole State of Illinois—a disgrace to the courts of the State, to the government of the State, to the Governor of the State, and to the people of the State.

Southern Illinois was notorious for violence long before the Tribune was founded, back in the days when Shawneetown, twenty-five miles east of Harrisburg on the Ohio, was a commercial and banking power and could turn down a request for a ten-thousand-dollar loan from the village of Chicago with the message, You are too far from Shawneetown ever to amount to anything. Some historians have suggested that Cave-in-Rock, a cavern overlooking the Ohio below Shawneetown, was the birthplace of organized crime in the United States. Robbers, counterfeiters and murderers used the cave as a headquarters and a place to store booty plundered from immigrant families floating down the river in flatboats.

Cave-in-Rock’s bloodiest tenants were Big Harpe and Little Harpe, Micijah and Wiley, brothers who killed for the pleasure of it, attacking travelers with the terrible cry We are the Harpes! and slaughtering their victims with knives and tomahawks, then slicing them open, tearing out the innards, and filling the bodies with stones to sink them in the river. They ranged about accompanied by antecedents of Charles Manson’s followers, three women who shared the brothers sexually and bore them three children. Big Harpe’s infant daughter irritated him one day with her crying, so he bashed out her brains against a tree. The Harpes’ documented victims number in the forties, but they killed many more than that, until Big Harpe was finally cornered, shot, and decapitated by the father of one of his victims, who lodged the head in the crotch of a tree as a warning. Little Harpe was hanged in 1804. They were serial murderers before the term was coined.

More recently Charlie Birger, a bootlegger and gangster who virtually ruled Little Egypt from 1925 to 1927, brought a brief, national notoriety to southern Illinois and created of himself an enduring legend that says much about the place. Named Sachna Itzik Birger at his birth in Lithuania in 1882, Charlie emigrated with his family to New York in 1887 and moved on to St. Louis. By 1913, after a stint in the 13th U.S. Cavalry, he was selling beer and whiskey to coal miners in southern Illinois. When the Klan interfered with his bootlegging, Charlie engineered the murder of its leader in a shoot-out at the Canary Cigar Store at the European Hotel in Marion in January 1925.

Charlie Birger was popular. Even today, local cynics say, the people of Harrisburg would erect a statue to him if they could get away with it. He won their affection by protecting them from the rival Shelton brothers’ gang and by well-publicized acts of charity, donations to church building funds, gifts of candy and ice cream to children, bags of groceries left on the doorsteps of the poor. Harrisburg was where he lived and educated his children, as he said in a radio broadcast over station WEBQ (We Entertain Beyond Question) in 1926. Nor were folks on the highways in any danger, because a gangster’s bullet in this instance will be aimed at an enemy gangster. He liked to parade the town square in his big Lincoln, armored and decked out with firing chairs and gun slits, a couple of his men perched on top with machine guns.

Baron of Egypt, America’s Robin Hood, a writer for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury called him, noting that Charlie often dressed the part with his soft brown leather coat, riding breeches, leather hunting cap, bright yellow cavalry boots, and jingling spurs. His tailor, recalling Charlie’s fondness for a large beer stein decorated with portraits of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, called him a knight of another sort. He was the local killer made good. People looked up to this Robin Hood, this protector who kept the booze flowing and dispensed gifts. His was a time of relative prosperity in Egypt. The coal mines were at full tilt, everyone had a job, but nobody was getting rich, because the mine owners, like the railroad owners, were all absentee. The big money ended up in Chicago or left the state. Only Charlie Birger appeared to have whipped the system, with a Hair that made him the darling of reporters from St. Louis, Chicago, and the East.

Live and let live is my motto, Charlie liked to say. And I don’t know what in the hell’s the matter with me. Every time I kill a man it makes me sick afterwards. I guess it’s my stomach.

In 1928 he was hanged for the murder of the mayor of West City. Five hundred ticket-holding spectators filled the courtyard of the Benton jail for the event; others jammed the street outside and peered from the windows of buildings across the way.

It’s a beautiful world, Charlie Birger said just before he dropped. It made wonderful copy.

After Charlie Birger’s hanging, the region grew somnolent. The Great Depression came early, hit hard, and lingered until the middle of World War II. The coal mines never fully recovered; southern Illinois missed out on the postwar economic boom. People stayed on, attached to the land between the rivers, used to the old ways, working sporadically in the mines, growing corn and peaches, talking of new industries that never appeared, cashing relief checks, hunting and fishing and going to church. Many of the educated young cleared out, so the population remained about the same in 1984 as it had been in 1934. Violence was frequent but less dramatic than before, accepted merely as the way things were. As if longing for the glamorous, wild old days, county officials put up a historical marker in 1976 on the site of Shady Rest, Charlie Birger’s roadhouse and arsenal, where a man could buy a drink and a woman and bet on a cockfight or a dogfight. Quickly the marker vanished, shot up and blown up by ancient enemies or kids on a lark, nobody knew which.

Then in mid-December of 1984, something happened on a lonely road outside of St. Louis that woke Little Egypt up. A farmer, out to feed his horses at dawn, discovered the body of a young man. It looked like an execution: two shots to the head; dumped and abandoned.

Within a day the news reached Eldorado and Harrisburg and set people talking. The murdered young man was Sean Cavaness, twenty-two years old, the son of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, who was then living in Harrisburg and practicing at Pearce Hospital in Eldorado, as he had since 1955. Citizens of the two towns immediately recalled that Dr. Cavaness’s firstborn son, Mark, had also died of gunshot wounds several years before. Mark had been found lying near his truck on a farm Dr. Cavaness owned near Galatia, in Saline County. Most people believed that Mark had accidentally shot himself to death; there had been a lengthy investigation but never any arrests, nor even any known suspects; and people had pretty much forgotten about Mark until now. It seemed an unbearably cruel blow for the doctor to have to suffer, losing a second son like this. His wife had left him in 1971, taking all four of their sons with her. Then Mark had returned to Egypt, only to die, and now Sean was dead in St. Louis. Another boy, married, was living in St. Louis; and the fourth son was with his mother and her new husband somewhere up in Wisconsin. But the people of Eldorado and Harrisburg did not give too much thought to the distant ex-wife and the surviving sons. They grieved for their doctor.

No man in Little Egypt was more admired than Dr. John Dale Cavaness, or Dr. Dale, as he was affectionately called. He had a reputation for being the most skillful physician and surgeon in the region and the most kindly. He understood people, not only their illnesses, and he never asked those to pay who could not afford his services, but treated them for free, sometimes not even bothering to send a bill. His patients regarded him as a medical genius, as one of their own, and as a kind of Robin Hood. Religious folk wondered why God would have singled out this good man to bear such a heavy cross.

Then the unimaginable happened. After his son’s funeral in St. Louis, which had been attended by friends of the doctor from Little Egypt, detectives arrested Dr. Cavaness for Sean’s murder. The news tore through southern Illinois like a twister. Within days St. Louis homicide detectives were arriving armed with search warrants, nosing around Harrisburg and Eldorado like foreign agents. Not since the Herrin Massacre had anything like this happened to people used to minding their own business and telling outsiders to mind theirs. The story hit front pages and television news programs in Chicago and St. Louis.

These big-city sensationalists did not understand the doctor, local people insisted, nor the devotion of his patients and friends, nor the character of Little Egypt itself. Everybody knew that Sean had been unstable. Probably he had been killed by drug dealers— possibly he had committed suicide—the St. Louis police needed a scapegoat—the people of St. Louis wanted a hanging—so the rumors multiplied.

The doctor’s hometown supporters, organizing for his defense, began to attract attention throughout the Midwest and Upper South and in national publications. They set out to show the world what Dr. Dale Cavaness was really like.

2

IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN HIM FROM THE BEGINNING—THE fighting instinct, the intensity of will.

He was breech birth, his mother liked to say of him, and he’s been doing things the hard way ever since.

She often reminded her son and others of how she had nearly lost her own life, or so she said, giving him his. She talked about the event almost as if it had been a survival contest between mother and son that ended in a draw on October 15, 1925, when John Dale Cavaness battered his way into the world buttocks first.

He was Noma and Clarence Mark Peck Cavaness’s only child. After him, as Noma never tired of saying, she could not bear another.

She did not wish her son to forget her importance to him. When he was still very young, only three or four years old, she devised a new sort of contest with him. She would let him crawl up onto her bed with her to chatter and laugh and snuggle. In the middle of the giggling and maternal teasing Noma would pretend to die. All of a sudden, she would expel her breath, roll up her eyes and shut them, muttering, I’m dying, and lie there motionless.

It was the death game.

As she described it, Dale would crawl up to her face and touch it. Mommy! Mommy! he would begin to cry. No, Mommy! Don’t die, Mommy! Are you dead? No!

Soon he would be wailing hysterically, pounding at her with little fists. She would stay still.

Then, just as he was ready to hurl himself onto the floor in agony, Noma would pretend to revive. She would open her eyes and laugh. And the boy would cling to her, reprieved.

The remarkable thing about the death game, Noma Cavaness always said, was how frightened little Dale became. She dared not let the game last too long, not even as long as she could hold her breath. He might have gone berserk with terror and grief.

His mother’s hold on him remained strong for the first ten years or so. His father worked as a brakeman on what was then the Louisville and Nashville railroad. The L&N ran southeast from St. Louis to Eldorado, over toward Shawneetown and across the Ohio into Kentucky and beyond, so Peck Cavaness was often away for days at a time and never had regular working hours. Noma was ever present and watchful. They called the boy Dale after Noma’s father’s family. Her mother and father lived in the house next door on Maple Street in Eldorado, just across from the Ferrell Hospital, with her aunt and uncle next door on the other side. Dales set the tone of daily life.

Of the Dales (English in origin) and the Cavanesses (Scotch-Irish), the Dales were the older, more established family in the area, along with the Wards, Noma’s mother’s people. The Dales had been in southern Illinois since before the Civil War, migrating up from the South, establishing the settlement of Dale in Little Egypt as a timber town in the days when pioneers were still clearing the great forests. The town remained a point of family pride, although by the 1930s it had dwindled to scarcely a village on the road between Eldorado and McLeansboro, where the Dales and the Cavanesses shared a common graveyard. The social gap between the two families was not large; but in their regional longevity the Dales had acquired bits of property here and there and the respectability that land bestowed. They were not rich, but they were middle class. As a working man, Peck Cavaness had married a smidgen above himself.

Noma wanted all the Dales’ respectability, and then some, passed on to her son, and she wanted him to rise in the world. It was she who insisted on his finishing his homework every night and prodded him about his grades, which were excellent from the start. It was she who told him that he was smarter and better than the other boys and that she and his father would sacrifice to get him places. And it was she who took him to Sunday school and to services every Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church in Eldorado, where young Dale heard sermons in the gloomy, strict Calvinist mode of those days, with emphasis on predestination and the unknowable nature of God’s chosen, the elect. You could never be sure whether you were saved or damned; all you knew was that the matter had already been decided. It was a hopeful sign to be successful in this life. Achieving respectability might possibly mean that, through God’s mysterious grace, you had been saved, even as not being able to pay your way might indicate that you were headed for perdition. So you always wore your new shoes to church; they squeaked, and everyone could hear that you could afford new ones. But only God knew your fate. The best you could do was to work hard, hope, and pray, as the hymn said:

Few are thy days and full of woe,

O man of woman born!

Thy doom is written, "Dust thou art,

And shalt to dust return!"

Cheered by this hope, with patient mind

I’ll wait heaven’s high decree,

Till the appointed period come

When death shall set us free. Amen.

Whatever her sternness, Noma made the best peach cobbler in the world, and nobody could match her fried chicken or chicken and dumplings. But the way she made Dale dress for school increased the tension between mother and son. She insisted that he wear fancy corduroy knickerbockers when the other boys all ran about free in bib overalls ordered once a year from the Sears catalog. Those knickers set Dale apart, as Noma wanted and as he hated. He was not allowed to get dirty. On the rare occasions when Dale did come home with mud on his knickers, Noma would throw a fit. He had gotten dirty just to spite her, she told him. He had run off wallering in the mud just to infuriate her.

She also forced Dale to study the violin, a radical choice in a place where a baseball bat or a shotgun, or at worst a country fiddle, was the preferred instrument. Soon he was getting beaten up all the time. Mother Noma complained to the teacher and the principal, but other boys continued to waylay and pummel him, calling him a priss and a mama’s boy.

Peck Cavaness knew and worried about the beatings. If he could not tell Noma how to be a mother, he knew he would have to help his son become a man. One afternoon when he was off work from the railroad, Peck stood in the backyard near the run where he kept his two hunting dogs and watched Dale come home from the sixth grade. Up the graveled alley he saw his son running from a crowd of bigger boys who shouted after him and chased him until they noticed his father and retreated.

Don’t you ever let me catch you running away like that again, Peck told Dale. The next time that happens, you stand your ground, hear?

Peck let his son know about the time a couple of old boys from the Charlie Birger gang had tried to intimidate him. Peck had been standing on the Eldorado platform waiting for Noma to return from visiting relatives. These gangsters had ordered him to move on. They said they were clearing the platform for somebody important. Peck told them they could go to hell, there wasn’t anybody more important than his wife. One of them started to reach inside his coat for his pistol, but Peck decked him with a quick right cross. While the other one stood there like a dummy, stunned for a moment, Peck lit out, ran·home, and fetched his shotgun. When he made it back to the station, the gangsters were gone and Noma was waiting for him, wondering why he had shown up to meet her carrying his gun.

I wasn’t about to let some two-bit gangsters push me around, Peck said, and they knew it. You stand and fight or don’t bother coming home.

For the rest of his life Dale spoke of that moment as a turning point. The next day he faced his tormentors and fought. He found that he could fight like hell. He was a small boy but he used his feet as well as his fists and, when he had to, his teeth. The word got around that if you got into a scrap with Curly Cavaness, as he was called, you remembered it. He could pick his own opponents and found that he could take punishment without giving ground, could endure pain, and that not giving up and not caring if you got hurt meant more than how big you were.

The knickerbockers gave way to jeans. The violin was left behind. He kept up with his studies, but he began spending more time on sports, and Noma had to relent when her boy came home as dirty as the next kid.

Dale had not really needed the knickers to know that he and his family were better off than most of the people in Eldorado. Throughout the Depression, six out of ten men were out of work and on relief in Little Egypt. Few could pay taxes, and running water was cut off in most towns by 1932. People dug wells in their yards and reverted to outdoor privies. Many lost their electricity and saw their houses fall apart for lack of paint and other maintenance.

Southern Illinois depended on coal, and the mines shut down one after another. In 1925, twenty-five mines in Saline County had been operating; by 1939 the number was down to ten, some of these strip mines requiring few workers. In Eldorado—called one of Seven Stranded Coal Towns in a report by the Works Projects Administration—the typical family of four, taking into account all available forms of relief, averaged about forty dollars a month in income. Half of this went for food. People ate a lot of water gravy—bacon dripping, flour, salt, and water, poured over bread if they had it. When lodges and churches distributed surplus government food, people lined up for it, humiliated but starving. In the hot summers, if a family had a nickel to spare, they could make a twelve-and-a-half-pound block of precious ice, wrapped in rags and stowed under the house, last for three or four days, meaning the magic of iced tea and lemonade. A man might find a day’s work now and then in a mine, if he could get transportation to the job. He could pick peaches for a few days a year, getting paid mostly in fruit. He could collect scrap metal and coat hangers, make flower pots out of tin cans, or clean tombstones in an effort to create goods and services no one wanted or could afford.

Through all these years Peck Cavaness was able to bring home his paycheck, and Noma kept house meticulously and could afford the materials to do so. Her hardwood floors shone; her pots and pans gleamed; no cobweb lasted through a day. It was a modest, white frame house, two bedrooms and a porch; but Peck and Noma cared for it religiously. Peck could repair just about anything, and if he wanted a rest, he could get the whole house painted for five dollars, with scores of men desperate for the work.

On December 3, 1932, Dale wrote a letter:

Dear Santa Clause,

I have been a fairly good boy. . . .

He asked for a football and a bathrobe, a desk and a watch. His mother, he told Santa Claus, wanted a dress and a new floor lamp. His daddy wanted a billfold, a new tie, and a bird dog. That was quite a Christmas list for any Eldorado family that year, when the last thing most local men needed was a new billfold. A typical Christmas present was a pair of those overalls from Sears, and many families saved every penny they had for the spring, when they could buy some chicks from the Otis Carter Hatchery at a dollar apiece. A few White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds in your yard meant eggs and the occasional fryer throughout the year. Every morning at six A.M. over station WEBQ in Harrisburg, Otis Carter broadcast the virtues of his chicks direct by remote control from his Eldorado hatchery on a country-music program which was followed at seven by The Baptist Hour. Carter’s sales took off, chickens being about the only thriving business in Egypt then.

If Peck Cavaness had been a religious man, which he was not, leaving the praying to his wife, he would have thanked the Lord at grace before Sunday dinner of chicken or pork roast. He was grateful that he and his family were spared the hunger and misery so many of their neighbors were suffering. The Cavanesses had many other advantages. Because Peck had a car and could afford gasoline, he was able to take his son fishing and hunting all over Egypt. By the time Dale was twelve they would head for the woods on a free autumn Saturday to get some quail, which Noma would fry up with her special brown gravy rich with pan juices. Dale quickly became an ace with a shotgun. He learned from his father how to imagine an invisible line between the gunsight and the target, and he had terrific eyesight and reflexes. He went after birds like a soldier stalking the enemy. Before long he had his own gun and was outshooting his dad.

Dale wanted to win at everything. When there was no one around, he practiced sports by himself, shooting baskets and throwing balls and running wind sprints to improve speed and stamina. He would challenge anybody to a race and was always surprising boys bigger and supposedly faster than he by beating them in the last few steps.

In the summers he and his dad, sometimes with a couple of Dale’s schoolmates along, would take drives together, expeditions over to Shawneetown to swim off the levee and eat fried catfish, or to one of the county fairs. Peck would point out places of interest. Along Route 13 near Crab Orchard, Peck would stop to explore the burned-out shell of Charlie Birger’s cabin, Shady Rest. Men still gathered in a clearing in the woods behind the cabin to throw dice, stage cockfights and reminisce about the famous gangster. It was fun to search for spent cartridges buried under leaves or in the earth and imagine what gangster or lawman had been the target of the bullet.

There was so much in Little Egypt to appeal to the contrary in a boy, enough story, myth, legend, and history to inspire a Huck Finn or a Dracula. Everybody knew about Mike Fink the river rat who was so tough that he called himself half man and half alligator. Down at Cave-in-Rock you could play at river pirates and search for bloodstains left by the outlaws on thé walls of the big cavern. There were bloodstains too at the Old Slave House off the Harrisburg-Shawneetown road, a colonial mansion on a hill where runaway slaves had been held for resale before the Emancipation Proclamation. Under the eaves on the third floor, tiny cells with wooden bunks, chain anchors embedded in the floor, bars on the doorframes, and a torture rack made of rough timbers evoked the pro-slavery sentiments of Egypt and the peculiarly legal presence of slaves in this southeastern corner of the supposedly free state of Illinois. At the rear of the house a double-door carriage entrance permitted a cargo of runaways to be delivered discreetly, unloaded out of sight, and hurried up a winding stair to the prison above. The owner, John Crenshaw, an Englishman, entertained grandly on the ground floor with profits from his upstairs trade and from the nearby salt works, manned by slaves brought in under a special loophole enacted by the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1819. It was said that after dark at the Old Slave House you could hear strange cries emanating from the upper rooms and the mournful strains of spirituals.

Until 1938 Potts’ Inn still stood on a hill between Cave-in-Rock and Shawneetown. More bloodstains there, more nightmares. Everyone knew its grisly story, and it remained a popular spot to visit after the original building was torn down. There in the 1830s Billy Potts and his wife had kept a tavern. They were in league with James Ford, called Satan’s Ferryman, who either robbed and murdered travelers crossing the Ohio or sent them along Ford’s Ferry Road to Potts’ Inn. Mr. and Mrs. Potts would feed their guests and fill them with drink and then slice them up in their beds or stab them in the back as they stooped to drink from a clear spring on the hill. At first light they chopped their victims into pieces and buried them in the yard.

One day their son, Billy junior, returned home after a long absence. His parents did not know him with his long black beard, and he delighted in fooling them. They fed him and got him drunk. At midnight as the young man bent over the spring to drink, Billy Potts stabbed his son in the back, the spring ran red with his blood, and Mrs. Potts cut him into pieces and buried him.

In the morning Billy junior’s friends came looking for him. Mr. and Mrs. Potts said no man of that description had visited the inn. They had not seen their son for ten years, they said. But when the friends left, Billy Potts and his wife dug up the remains. Under a shoulder blade, beside the fatal wound, they saw their son’s black birthmark, shaped like a four-leaf clover.

On Potts’ Hill, near the spring that runs clear again, a sign stands to remind the visitor of the boy who was marked for death and of the father who killed his son.

3

IF VINCE LOMBARDI HAD NOT SAID THAT WINNING ISN’T everything, it’s the only thing, Dale Cavaness might have said it; he certainly believed it. By the time he entered Eldorado Township High School in 1939, Dale was what sportswriters used to call a real scrapper. Winning by intimidation was another phrase he might have coined, making up for what he lacked in height and weight with a fierce aggressiveness. He would challenge anybody to arm wrestle or Indian wrestle, the veins standing out on his temples and neck, breaking the other fellow down by force of will. Strong arms and shoulders made him more powerful than he appeared. He worked on building up his strength. At home he did push-ups and chinned himself from a doorsill every morning and evening.

He also made a lot of noise. In a different environment Dale would have been called a loudmouth, but the rugged atmosphere of southern Illinois, where most men earned their living through their sweat, suited his style. Hey, Rudie! Dale would shout to a buddy, or, Let’s get all the Rudies together and have a game! It was a term he had picked up from a carney at a county fair. Nobody knew exactly what a Rudie was, but the name conveyed what Dale liked best, rough-and-tumble, rowdy times with plenty of shouting and shoving and competition.

Dale was a great one for practical jokes, the thumbtack left on the chair seat or pennies rolled down the classroom aisle to drive the teacher to distraction. Once in a while somebody would think that Dale had gone too far, as when he asked to see a girl’s new watch and then dropped it and stepped on it accidentally on purpose. He made himself a lifelong enemy with that one. The laughter he provoked could quickly sour into a fistfight; but as a good student and a school leader he was above suspicion from authorities and could get away with pranks other boys could not afford to dare, making him of the crowd and yet above it.

He was always near the top of his class in grades, science and mathematics coming most easily to him. In his senior year he earned a certificate of merit as one of the fifteen best students in a class of a hundred and nineteen. Other students sought his help, which he willingly gave, unless the fellow having trouble was too thick to understand. Dale did not mind telling the slow-witted not to waste his time. Only his history teacher seemed indifferent to his brilliance, giving him consistent B’s and earning Dale’s resentment. Dale publicly vowed revenge.

The other students admired him enough to elect him president of the Latin Club and president of the Hi-Y, a service club sponsored by the YMCA and stressing leadership and clean, Christian virtues. He became sophomore-class president and then junior-class president. No other student during his time at Eldorado High School quite matched his combination of brains, popularity, and athletic accomplishment.

As a junior in the fall of 1941, Dale made the varsity football squad. Since he weighed only about a hundred and thirty-five pounds and was barely five feet five, he did not see much action that year. That winter and spring, however, he lettered in basketball as a guard and as a miler led the track team to an undefeated conference record. Dale ‘Curly’ Cavaness was impressive with his 4:42.5 mile, the Eldorado Daily Journal commented after the Eagles had defeated Carrier Mills and Vienna (pronounced Vyanna) in a triangular meet. Timed on his own, he was less impressive; against competition he managed the final kick to win.

In April Dale and two other Eagles, a discus thrower and a low hurdler, entered the southern-Illinois invitational at Cairo to compete against entrants from thirty-four other high schools. Winners would go on to the state championships. Dale’s Eldorado teammates did not place, and his own grit was not enough for him to win; but he finished third in the mile, twenty-five yards behind the winner, who was clocked at 4:37. (The best mile in the state that year was run by an Urbana boy at 4:28.8, twelve seconds better than Dale’s best time.) Dale’s coach told his teammates that they should look to Cavaness as an example of someone who was making the best of his ability. It was effort like his that would take a boy far in life.

His drive paid off in his senior football season. He had by then reached his full height of about five feet seven. He went out for left halfback, but at a hundred and fifty pounds, he had to battle for a starting position. There was no free substitution in those days. Players went the full sixty minutes on offense and defense. Dale would have to show that he could bring down bigger boys in the open field.

In the opening game against the Marion Wildcats, Dale received a punt on his own forty-five-yard line and took off, streaking fifty-five yards down the sideline for the only Eagle touchdown in a 7–6 loss and earning himself a permanent starting berth. Against Anna the Eldorado Purple and Gold lost again, and Dale was hurt. He came back in a 26–0 victory over Carterville, scoring an extra point on a plunge through center and intercepting a pass on the twenty-three, zigzagging his way in for the score with seconds left to play.

After the Eagles defeated Johnston City 19–0, the Journal singled out Dale Cavaness, star passer and runner . . . . His brilliant performances in the backfield for the Eagles have sparkplugged his team throughout the season, and his presence has meant the difference between victory and defeat. Eldorado fans were counting on Dale to bring them their first victory since 1934 against archrival Harrisburg.

Harrisburg versus Eldorado was the local equivalent of Harvard versus Yale or Notre Dame versus U.S.C. The other high school games were played on Friday nights under lights, but traditionally the Eagles faced the Harrisburg Bulldogs on Thanksgiving Day. Families saved the turkey until after the final gun. It was the event of the year for both towns, bigger than the Fourth of July or the Saline County fair. In 1942, because of war shortages and rationing, the game was moved up to Armistice Day afternoon as part of an abbreviated season.

The big game was tense from the start as the favored Bulldogs and the Eagles traded touchdowns. Dale brought the crowd to its feet in the first quarter by heaving a fifty-yard touchdown pass. The Eagles used the old Notre Dame box formation. More and more as the season progressed, the center snapped the ball directly to Dale at left half, and it was anybody’s guess whether he would run or pass. In the fourth quarter he hit his left end eighteen yards downfield for another touchdown. Eldorado lost, 26–25, a heartbreaker, but the Eagles had made twelve first downs to the Bulldogs’ four and felt they should have won.

In a subsequent 12–7 loss to Carmi, Dale tossed a twelve-yard pass for the lone Eldorado touchdown. The Eagles played their final game of the season against DuQuoin in the rain and mud. With the score tied 6–6, Dale faded back to his left and then flipped a pass cross-field to his right for the winning extra point.

The Eagles ended up with three wins against six defeats, but they had scored a hundred points to their opponents’ hundred and twelve, with Dale responsible for nearly half the Eldorado scores. He had proved such a threat that the coach had adapted his offensive strategy to Dale’s talents, and Dale led the Eagles in yards gained on the ground. It was murder trying to bring the little guy down, and he tackled like a freight train. Some of the admiring Harrisburg Bulldogs gave him a new nickname, Toughie.

In Little Egypt no one received as much attention as the star high school athlete. Dale’s performance in basketball during the 1942–43 season equaled his football feats. For a while it looked as if the season would have to be canceled because of wartime fuel restrictions, but parents pooled their allotments of six gallons of gasoline a week to drive the boys to their games. Dale’s father never missed one of his son’s performances unless the railroad kept him at work.

The Eagles captured the Goshen Trail Conference championship with a perfect 20–0 record, and overall they were 23–4. The sweetest win came against Harrisburg, 38–37, to take the Christmas Holiday Tournament crown on Eldorado’s home court. That low score was typical of basketball in the 1940s, when it was more of a defensive contest, featuring ball control and set shots. Although height was less of a factor then, Dale was still the shortest player on his team, and as a guard, his role was primarily defensive. Even so, he managed to score as many as nine points in several games, and he averaged six—enough, when combined with his tenacious defending, to make him a star and the Eagles’ leader. Undoubtedly he would have improved his times in the mile run that spring, but pulled ligaments kept him on the sidelines during most of the track season.

As graduation approached, war was on everyone’s mind. Military training had begun at the high school. Boys could learn commando techniques, how to scale a wall and thrust a bayonet. The government announced its goal of an army of seven million by the autumn. Families that had not strayed from Little Egypt for generations saw their sons shipped off to mysterious places on the other side of the world. Every day the local newspapers printed letters home from sons abroad, almost every one of them expressions of longing for home cooking, the voices of parents, a walk in the southern Illinois woods. One boy wrote that he wished he could write a poem called These Things I Miss, listing apple pie, Eldorado’s tree-lined streets, a date with a pretty American girl. . . . When you are denied so much, you come to expect very little. Some letters included descriptions of ships blown up and comrades lost; none indicated the exact location of the absent son. Many boys from Little Egypt were sent to Northern Ireland in preparation for D-Day. Families would sit around reading the letters in the paper and talking about them, cherishing Eldorado’s blessings, for all its poverty. Local loyalties and patriotism ran high.

Dale decided that he would join the navy after graduation, instead of waiting to be drafted that summer. As for life after the war, if he made it through, he had his mind set on becoming a doctor.

There was never any question that Dale Cavaness would go to college and rise above his father’s status as a working man. If there was one boy in Eldorado who had ambition, it was Dale, and with his mother urging him on, nobody doubted that he had the will to achieve whatever he wanted. By the eighth grade he had begun talking about becoming a doctor.

To a degree, seeing his neighbors suffer through the Depression influenced his choice of medicine. He learned how important doctors were when so many people could not afford one. All around him signs of medical neglect were manifest. Malnutrition and the anxieties of long unemployment caused a variety of illnesses. Fathers leaned on WPA shovels while children scrounged in empty lots for dandelion and poke weeds their mothers could boil up with a little vinegar. It was not lost on Dale that the Cavanesses stayed well while other families averaged weeks of debilitating illness during the year, minor complaints turning major through lack of proper attention. A classmate had to stay out of school for a year because he had broken his eyeglasses and his parents could not afford a new pair. Toothaches had to be endured, since dental care was out of the question. When teeth fell out, false ones were a pricey vanity.

People relied on folk remedies common in Egypt. Pick an aching tooth with a hickory splinter, then stick the splinter into a freshly dug grave. For measles, tea made from sheep droppings was supposed to speed recovery. A dirty sock tied around the throat cured tonsilitis, while sassafras tea thinned the blood at the end of winter. A drop of buttermilk poured into the ear soothed an earache.

In this gloom Noma Cavaness developed a fondness for attending funerals. No matter what the church, Noma would be there, usually accompanied by a lady friend with similar impulses, singing and praying and joining the procession to the graveyard. Back home she would tell Dale and Peck about the service, about what the minister had said and which hymns had been sung, and often she would draw her moral: If only the deceased had been able to afford medical care, death might have been avoided. Noma had no truck with home remedies. Wasn’t Dale lucky, she would remind him, that when he got sick, they could send for the doctor right away. Otherwise he might be dead. If she had not had a good doctor helping her to give birth to him, she wouldn’t be going to other people’s funerals now. She’d be long under the sod.

Late in January of 1937 the worst Ohio River flood ever recorded swamped the farmlands of Little Egypt, pouring millions of gallons down mine shafts and driving people from their homes all the way from Shawneetown to Harrisburg. A million and a half acres in southern Illinois went under. Thousands who had endured collapsed farm prices, years of unemployment, and the drought of 1936 now lost whatever they had left. Army engineers had to dynamite the levee above Shawneetown to let the waters flow in before they rampaged over the top. At its height the flood stood fifty feet deep in Shawneetown’s Main Street. Most of its citizens reluctantly abandoned historic Old Shawneetown forever to live in tents and eventually to build New Shawneetown four miles inland. As the mayor said, the lives of two generations had been ruined; they owed it to their children to relocate.

Throughout the countryside villages went under, automobiles and farm equipment swirled away and sank, permanently wrecked beneath the flood. Houses caved in, floated off. Some people, refusing to leave, chopped holes in their ceilings and frantically tried to store furniture in their attics before huddling on rooftops to be rescued—if they were lucky. Livestock swam until dead, their carcases caught in trees.

Although Harrisburg was more than twenty miles from the Ohio, backwaters seeped into the town, rising an inch an hour for several days, inundating eighty percent of the area and sending its citizens into refugee centers. Harrisburg’s water and gas plants shut down; lumps of coal became precious; water had to be sent in five-gallon containers from Marion and Eldorado.

It was an economic disaster and a medical one. Women gave birth in schoolrooms, even in boats. Fears of cholera and typhoid epidemics spread, and exposure led to scores of pneumonia cases. Because Eldorado had eight physicians and was the closest town to the flood safe from the waters—Muddy, only four miles away, had to be evacuated—the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the National Guard, and the U.S. Naval Reserve made it their headquarters. The Red Cross set up headquarters in the city hall and in the American Legion hall, and the mayor of Eldorado issued a proclamation asking people to open their homes to the refugees and to donate to the relief fund. Twelve hundred refugees poured into Eldorado, filling churches, lodges, the bank, the Cinderella Ballroom. They arrived in boats on the outskirts of town, soaked and helpless. The First Christian Church became a kitchen and a dining hall, with volunteer women cooking three meals a day for the homeless. Steamers put in at Shawneetown to take people out on the swollen river. Motorboats arrived by train from Chicago and from as far away as Boston for the rescue effort, which was frustrated by a freeze that followed the rains. Men had to dynamite the ice to free the boats, and the weather made the medical situation more dangerous. Eldorado doctors offered free vaccination against typhoid, diphtheria, and smallpox.

Like everyone else in Eldorado, Dale and his parents worked to aid the refugees. Noma cooked. Peck was out with L&N railroad crews rescuing people and providing boxcars for shelter. Dale’s Sunday-school class donated eight dollars to the relief fund, and his grammar school welcomed refugee children and their teachers during the nearly two months that it took for the waters to subside.

The flood became a decisive influence on Dale’s vision of his personal future. In this spectacle of human dependancy, everyone praised the Eldorado doctors whose work, Illinois Governor Henry Horner among· others said, prevented epidemics and kept the death toll in Little Egypt to around forty. Prominent among these doctors was Lee Pearce, whose father had founded and run the Eldorado Hospital before turning it over to his son. It was after the ’37 flood that Dale began talking about becoming a doctor and started paying attention to Dr. Pearce’s daughter, Helen Jean, who was just Dale’s age and in school with him. By the time the two entered high school, Dale was seeing a lot of Helen Jean. She followed his athletic feats, they went to the movies together—there were three picture shows in Eldorado then—and he began dropping by the Pearces’ house regularly.

Helen Jean was a small, pretty girl with short brown hair—kewpie-doll-cute was how some people described her. She was neither as hard-driving nor as successful as Dale in school—as a doctor’s daughter, she did not have to be—and socially she was above him, but with his brains and ambition they were a natural match. Noma Cavaness was jealous of her but could hardly disapprove of so irrefutably respectable a girl. As for Helen Jean’s parents, Lee and Irma Pearce took to Dale from the start. What Eldorado parent would not have welcomed Dale Cavaness as a daughter’s beau and prospective son-in-law? By senior year, Dale and Helen Jean came to be considered sweethearts, marriage a possibility. Most of the other boys had nothing but the coal mines in their